Due to the availability of the GPS-enabled cameras and mobile phones, location metadata such as latitude and longitude information are automatically associated with various user generated content such as, but not limited to, multimedia content, text content, audio content, and visual content. The location metadata thus provides the opportunity to users to spatially organize and browse the generated content. Various network services such as, but not limited to, Google Panoramio™, Blogger™, Flickr™ and other content sharing services allow a user to share and browse the content with other users. Network services can geo-reference the generated content, with the available location metadata and thus can organize the content in an accessible taxonomy of major locations or pin-point the origin of the content on a map to identify very small regions.
However, in practice, most of the users do not own GPS enabled devices, and thus many of the user generated content are location agnostic. Moreover, in many instances, users append some identifying information with the content such as metadata, and/or one or more annotations which help in organizing and browsing the content. Still, there are cases where the content does not contain any location information. In such cases, network services allow the users to manually geo-reference the content by manually dragging the content to a particular point on the map. But, this process is time consuming and generally less accurate than the content geo-referenced through location metadata.
Some of the existing solutions provides geo-referencing to the user-generated content based on the one or more annotations provided by the user. These solutions usually involve the extraction of textual or visual features from the content which are then modeled to determine the location information. However, these solutions are limiting as they assume the prior knowledge of the location through the information appended with the content and usually limit the scaling of the map by a few location granularities. Presently, the network services lack effective methods and systems to associate one or more locations with user generated content with better accuracy.